Addressing Nature features landscapes in which the human form and nature converge in an aesthetic and conceptual exploration of the materiality of nature’s surfaces – skin, earth and water. As one traverses this exhibition at Hamilton Artists Inc., deepening compositions call attention to supremacy and emphasize support by a pictoral emphasis on the metaphoric balance of weights and measures. For example, in Sand Action Peak the body functions as pedestal for pockets of sand, or as flotation device in the work Floating in A Pond. In the culminative video projection, Action with a Tree, one human figure balances on the back and rib cage of the other. In Curves on Logs 1 & 2, the position of the body references art historical female nudes reclining on tree trunks that double for the more traditional chaise lounge of Monet’s Olympia, and are joined in a composition reflecting Manet’s Dance. The history of Colourfield painting is referenced in a work of the same title (Colour Field), where brilliant shades of green and yellow are delivered by nature and create a composition somewhere between representation and abstraction. In this hybrid expanse, the artist’s limbs become simply another flower stem within the field of representation. Archetypal references are present in Atlas, where Zits appears to support the weight of a rock formation with his back, and in Unicorn where a horned branch emerges from his head, recalling the mythical Nordic horse Sleipner, from which the English word “slippery” is derived. The slippage of a stable referent perfectly describes the moments of interplay in Zits’ work, where a kind of gentle destabilization and reordering occurs between figure and ground in the land within which Zits’ works thrive. Aspects of representation and abstraction come to the fore and are then submerged within these compositions which unfold and close like the plant life with which they long to merge.
Zits’ body of work climbs from the entrance of the gallery counter clockwise to the final video installation. The ordering of these differently sized photographs into non-traditional groupings emphasizes the essential quality of the works as horizontal and vertical shapes/objects of various sizes, and recalls aspects of the compositional qualities of Modrian’s reductive configurations. ‘Jumps’ occur at viewing level and in the carefully considered spaces between the works and the groupings of works. In the visual landscape of the exhibition as a whole, such blips recall the quality of pixelation of Zits’ earlier paintings and photography; these configurations relate to the artist’s intermedial use of video, digital photography, painting and performance art. The visual blips in the viewing landscape also recall the reduction of form to its essential element as shared by both animate and inanimate objects, humans, animals and plants – the atom, and in the world of video and contemporary photographic representation, the pixel. The materiality of the digital image, its affect, and the resulting flux between representation and abstraction finds the body twisting and conspiring to become a part of the whole, and indeed of all life, in the work of Johannes Zits. Irene Loughlin